By Kyle Lemmon on May 16, 2011

Philadelphia’s kitchen-sink rock quartet Man Man is still howling at the moon on its fourth LP, but the stomping Waits-meets-Zappa blues compositions are given space to breathe under Mike Mogis’ (Bright Eyes) refining production. Lead noisemaker Honus Honus (Ryan Kattner) fiendishly uses songs as funhouses/torture chambers for his darkest relational fantasies. Just as beguiling through headphones or rattling from your Van Helsing boombox, the band’s pan-global instrumentations scrape rousing melodic heights and the grimiest of emotional lows.